Meet the Artist
Fareeha Khawaja is a contemporary artist based in the United States. She has exhibited and sold her work locally and internationally. She has curated various art exhibitions in the United States, Europe and South Asia and collaborated with various artists from around the world.
Khawaja was born in a Himalayan Valley in the northern Pakistan to a Kashmiri father and a Pathan mother. She graduated with a Bachelor's degree in Fine Arts from the University of Punjab, Lahore with a concentration in oil painting, and later did her MBA with a marketing major. Khawaja did her first solo art exhibition in Islamabad in 2005, which was very well received and further galvanized her innate passion to create art. She participated in various group and solo exhibitions in Pakistan including at the French Cultural Center, Khuch Khaas art gallery and various other cultural venues in Lahore and Islamabad while working in the United Nations Children's Fund UNICEF and later with UNESCO in Islamabad. After she immigrated to the United States, she continued pursing her passion for the arts.
Khawaja is a multidisciplinary artist and created diverse bodies of work over the years. Her abstract and surrealist series, Mood Swings A Private Collection Retrospective, and The Un-silent Solitude of Self, are an intriguing amalgam of rugged textures, spontaneous colors, sporadic lines, hyperbolic figures and blatant emotions, characterized as enigmatic, with hidden obscurities and a further meaning that compels one to go on thinking and looking. Her contemporary folk art series Jinga Art A Dream of Peace, is a fusion of contemporary, whimsical and fantasy folk Truck Art of Pakistan and the Mughal Miniature art of south Asia, which focuses on the exotic beauty and the peaceful picture of that region and its people.
Khawaja is passionate about using art for social change. She is an active member of Oahu art community and also the founder of Artists Without Borders, USA, a nonprofit community project she started in 2010. This project invites artists to volunteer and teach creative skills to vulnerable communities, refugees, at risk women and children in local shelters, refugee camps, and in war torn countries where creativity is often forgotten. Khawaja organizes free AWB Peace through Creativity art workshops and collaborates and creates art with local communities with a focus to give them a tool to help express their emotions through art, reclaim life, light and laughter, and regain their inner strength and peace through art. Khawaja has traveled and taught in several countries including Afghanistan and El Salvador where she taught collaborative children art workshops at Mobile Mini Circus for Children MMCC Kabul, Afghanistan and at Campemeneto magic, art and juggling camp in El Salvador among other projects. Her series Run Away with a Circus is inspired by her volunteer work in Afghanistan, which focuses on peace through creativity and circus art. Khawaja's recent series, Backlash Blues is inspired by Nina Simone's powerful songs about systematic racism and social injustice in America and the ongoing racism and senseless killing of black lives. Khawaja created this series in Washington DC during the COVID lockdowns.
Khawaja's passion for travel, cultures, nature and creativity pushed her artistic career in to a more adventurous direction when she moved to the Hawaiian Islands and created her surf art series, Mun Moji Soul Wave, inspired by her life on the Hawaiian Islands, and her nickname her parents gave her as a child, which in Urdu and Hindi languages mean, a heart free like a wave. Khawaja dedicated this series to her parents, and the Hawaiian people and their beautiful land that inspired her to create this series. Khawaja is currently living on the island of Oahu and working on creating several new series of paintings inspired by Hawaii.